AWS Security Blog

Tag: IAM

How to use policies to restrict where EC2 instance credentials can be used from

January 13, 2025: This post was updated to state the limitations of AWS service permissions with VPC endpoints. April 5, 2023: A fix has been added to the Service Control Policy examples to allow EC2 instances to mount encrypted EBS volumes. March 7, 2023: We’ve added language clarifying the requirement around using VPC Endpoints, and […]

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How to monitor and query IAM resources at scale – Part 2

In this post, we continue with our recommendations for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) APIs. In part 1 of this two-part series, we described how you could create IAM resources and use them soon after for authorization decisions. We also described options for monitoring and responding to IAM resource changes for entire accounts. […]

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How to monitor and query IAM resources at scale – Part 1

March 7, 2023: We’ve fixed a typo in the blog post. In this two-part blog post, we’ll provide recommendations for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) APIs, and we’ll share useful details on how IAM works so that you can use it more effectively. For example, you might be creating new IAM resources such as roles […]

The anatomy of ransomware event targeting data residing in HAQM S3

Ransomware events have significantly increased over the past several years and captured worldwide attention. Traditional ransomware events affect mostly infrastructure resources like servers, databases, and connected file systems. However, there are also non-traditional events that you may not be as familiar with, such as ransomware events that target data stored in HAQM Simple Storage Service […]

How to revoke federated users’ active AWS sessions

February 6, 2023: Updates added to explain an additional detail regarding the sourceIdentity field. In addition to using the sourceIdentity field to reference the user through various roles they have assumed, you may also construct your IAM trust policies to enforce acceptable sourceIdentity values or ensure any value for sourceIdentity is set. When you use […]

How to secure your SaaS tenant data in DynamoDB with ABAC and client-side encryption

If you’re a SaaS vendor, you may need to store and process personal and sensitive data for large numbers of customers across different geographies. When processing sensitive data at scale, you have an increased responsibility to secure this data end-to-end. Client-side encryption of data, such as your customers’ contact information, provides an additional mechanism that […]

You can now assign multiple MFA devices in IAM

At HAQM Web Services (AWS), security is our top priority, and configuring multi-factor authentication (MFA) on accounts is an important step in securing your organization. Now, you can add multiple MFA devices to AWS account root users and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users in your AWS accounts. This helps you to raise the […]

Announcing an update to IAM role trust policy behavior

April 16, 2024: Updated with information on AWS CloudTrail logging for roles that are still using the implicit trust behavior, and additional sample queries to find these roles. June 15, 2023: Enforcement has changed from a fixed date to an automated process starting June 30, 2023 that removed roles based on observed role assumption behavior. […]

How to let builders create IAM resources while improving security and agility for your organization

September 7, 2022: The post was updated to rephrase the brief of creating builder role with the builder policy attached as the permissions policy. Many organizations restrict permissions to create and manage AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resources to a group of privileged users or a central team. This post explains how you can […]

How to centralize findings and automate deletion for unused IAM roles

Maintaining AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resources is similar to keeping your garden healthy over time. Having visibility into your IAM resources, especially the resources that are no longer used, is important to keep your AWS environment secure. Proactively detecting and responding to unused IAM roles helps you prevent unauthorized entities from gaining access […]